Pharmaceutical companies will probably not start growing weed, but they stand to gain a great deal from marijuana use among young people if the conclusions of this New Scientist report are correct. I quote: "Daily cannabis use was associated with a five-fold increased risk of depression at the age of 20. Weekly use was linked to a two-fold increase. The regular users were no more likely to have suffered from depression or anxiety at the start of the study.",
"Another team calculates that eliminating cannabis use in the UK population could reduce cases of schizophrenia by 13 per cent."

From my own experience, having had the misfortune to be given cookies spiked with heavy doses of marijuana at college, which precipitated panic attacks, resulted in hospitalisation, ruined my degree and civil service career prospects, and lead to emotional instability that has jeopardised my current career, the conclusions of the research ring true.

Marijuana is probably not a gateway to stronger illegal drugs, it seems to me; but it could well be gateway to legal drugs like anti-depressants and treatments for schizophreniform disorders.

Part of the tension in the Minority Report comes from the fact that, because the Tom Cruise character knows the future, he has a choice. I have never read any discussion of the responsibility that knowledge of the future therefore places on the government and law-enforcement agencies. If the authorities know the future, don't they have a moral responsibility to tell the would-be criminal so that he or she can choose? The movie-goer could easily miss this point because in the illustration given at the start of the movie of how pre-crime works, the criminal is caught in the nick of time. I would say that the moral responsibility of the government to tell the would-be criminal that they are aware that the would-be criminal is formulating the intent to commit a crime is as great as the would-be criminal's moral responsibility not to commit it. It is, therefore, a crime by omission for the government and law enforcement agencies not to tell if they have the opportunity.

I think we should consider cause and effect here. Does the woman's soliciting cause the man to formulate the intent to commit rape or does the man's intent to commit rape, as evidenced by his suspected involvement in a child pornography ring, cause the woman to solicit? Like Hume, I'd be inclined to deconstruct the notion of cause and effect and say that we simply have an "accidental conjunction of objects". What objects? Obscene photos and sex toys. I would guess, on the basis of the meagre evidence in the article, that the defence could say that the money Peterson paid was actually, he thought, to pay for sex with the woman, having suspected all along that she was lying but trying to get him aroused, and that he took the sex toys along for the sex act with her.

The views of Philip Jenkins, author of Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in America are relevant here, I think. (this quotation is taken from an interview in disinfo'sYou are being lied to):

RK: What ill effects have come from these child molestation panics? What ill effects are we currently seeing?

PJ: I think that threats to children serve as stealth justifications for policies that advocates would be afraid to avow openly...Also, they justify a vast and self-sustaining bureaucracy of social workers and psychologists, whose whole careers and (let's be frank) bank accounts depend entirely on maintaining a level of panic about threats to children.

People define human beings as "the sign making animal". I think that is a bit species-ist. Animals clearly have the ability to communicate using sounds and gestures. What distinguishes us, I believe, is the fact that we have mastered fire. We are a "fire-making animal" and that creates a number of attendant responsibilities and drives to civilization. I recently read an interesting interpretation of the symbol of the cross--namely, that it symbolizes the ancient human ability to generate fire by rubbing two sticks together. I think it is reasonable, when considering the enormous evolutionary advance that the mastery of fire has brought about, to speak of the "fires of the mind".

Chomsky is a thinker who is very interested in mind-control, how human minds are manipulated so that thoughts do not become too "conflagratory" and he notes that violence is extremely effective in achieving its aims. He also notes that terrorism is the weapon of the strong. It is an extravagant mystery, (I'm using a phrase from Heart Of Darkness) that in spite of recognizing how effective violence is in achieving political ends, as far as I know Chomsky does not endorse it as a means to achieve the political ends that he supports, like amnesty. I would suggest that Chomsky's world view regarding mind control is a projection of his own aggressive attempt to control the fires of his own mind but it happens to be the right world view. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that people aren't against you. It seems that Chomsky, ironically, is true to the real meaning of jihad, namely using such violence as you feel to struggle to master yourself.

Is violence inevitable? According to New Scientist,it's not love, affection or even blatant self-interest that is at work in human cooperation - it's anger. Nevertheless, this does not mean, in my view, that we are no better than apes. Violence is always with us but I think it can be sublimated into civilization and the growth of new forms. To give an example, I encountered some research where apes had been taught to recognize the first few numbers, say, from 1 to 6. An experiment was done where two dishes of sweets were placed in front of the ape, one with more sweets than the other. The rule the experimenter was applying was that the ape always got the dish other than the one it chose. The apes were unable to learn the rule and became extremely distressed when they always tried to grasp the dish with more sweets but ended up with the dish containing fewer. However, when the sweets on the dishes were replaced by the corresponding number, the apes were suddenly able to learn the rule and choose the smaller number in order to get more sweets. This kind of liberation through number is what I mean when I say that we can sublimate our selfish, grasping instinct to violence and use it to drive forward the frontiers of knowledge in academic pursuits, in which Chomsky is exemplary.

Photoshop this image of Chomsky grasping sweets.

In Foucault's view, madness is a superior form of truth. Witness Chomsky's latest "modest proposal", which posits an insane idea, "Let Iran invade Iraq" and asserts that this insane proposal is "more reasonable than the plans now being implemented - or it would be, if the administration's professed goals had any relation to the real ones."

And so we come to a good definition of madness, in my view, that is "bullshit projected out" and one can see why, in a world where people lie in order to wring cash out of others, intelligent people lose their marbles. I have no doubt that the lies told about Michael Jackson have gotten to him. When intelligent people have difficulty or lose the ability to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the unreal, I think we can help by being scrupulous about telling the truth, as we perceive it to be.

"Grammar" and "glamour" have the same etymology and are both related to "grimoire", a book of spells. We should ask our students to ponder on the glamour of grammar and the grammar of glamour while they are reading that modern grimoire, "Harry Potter".

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

Even Shakespeare mixed his metaphors. Maybe Hamlet's words are the reason why the "To be or not to be" speech is central to English studies because when you are faced with a tidal wave of text, as a teacher, you really don't know where to begin in terms of correcting the grammar. After ten years of being a language teacher, I have accepted that the best one can hope for from a foreign learner of English is successful communication. If what the student says is comprehensible, then that's good enough for me. Drilling correct structure is largely pointless--students, like children, learn language better if you respond positively to what they say but one should, if possible, use the phrase that they tried to use in one's response correctly. One does not have that luxury when marking essays; it's impractical, and one is aware that the corrections that one makes are so much tinkering around the edges. Nevertheless, correction has to be done.

The converse of this is that when I was at Oxford reading English, there was a don in one of the colleges who would never correct the grammatical or lexical errors of native speakers on the grounds that, since they were native speakers, they could not, by definition, make mistakes.

At the moment I'm teaching in China. I am embarrassed and ashamed to be teaching the language of a nation that oppressed the Chinese people. It is my karma to hear foreign grammars imposed on the English tongue. If the English language has an innate beauty which may seem lost when it gets into the hands of foreigners (a beauty which James Joyce quite consciously tried to destroy in the Penelope episode in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as an almighty "Fuck you" to the English), then it is my hope, my grounds of faith and belief that foreign tongues will turn the language that once was English into something yet more beautiful.

J.K. Rowling rescues her character through the reinvention of that apex of class privilege, the English public school

I was not aware that public schools required "reinvention". As far as I am aware, public schools such as Eton and Rugby are still flourishing and Blair has done nothing to return formerly government run (comprehensive) schools that opted to become privately funded, grant aided schools back to their former state. The important social question is whether J.K. Rowling is describing a public school, which obviously is the apex of class privilege because children go there because their parents can afford it, or a school for the gifted, which children attend because of their merit, aptitude and excellence in a particular field. The former are quite common in Britain. The latter, sadly, are not. Other governments recognize the importance of having schools for the gifted and directing talented kids early into an educational stream that will develop their talents. If Blair is serious about turning Britain into a meritocracy, rather than an aristo-plutocracy, then he should think about providing schools for kids with particular gifts and encourage teachers to be on the look out for 'em

Studies in North Africa, where Muslim boys are circumcised, suggest that circumcision reduces the chances of spreading AIDS. This quotation from New Scientist:

"There is at least one alternative intervention that could be more than 50 per cent effective, points out Helene Gayle, director of the HIV/AIDS and TB programme at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

She says more than 30 studies have suggested a halving of the risk of HIV transmission if the male sexual partner is circumcised. Gayle is calling for further studies to investigate whether there is a clear cause and effect between the procedure and the risk reduction. "

Eurasian governments should look into this as a matter of urgency.

One can understand how educators, wishing to spare genuine homosexuals a lifetime of fear and living under threat would promote homosexuality as a positive, healthy, natural lifestyle choice. However, current education does a disservice to people in not emphasising how, if they choose to engage in gay sex, then they are making themselves more vulnerable to sadistic sodomy. From my own experience, a guy attempted to rape me in an Egyptian bathhouse once because the notion in that part of the world--and in San Francisco too, judging by the poz.com article--is that if you are perceived as available then you are available for every guy. It is like animals suddenly attacking a member of their own species because they see that the creature is wounded. And the "bottoms" seem to say, like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, "Once a victim, always a victim, that is the Law." And, like Tess, the "victim" often becomes a murderer.

Are there imposters in the homosexual community who label themselves "gay" but merely do so to provide an excuse to sadistically sodomise other men? Incidents of male rape are greatly underreported.The evidence from Michael Scarce's book Male on Male Rape suggests that it is often "heterosexual" men who rape other men. Is a man who describes himself as "heterosexual", but engages in sodomistic rape of other men, right to label himself so? Are there men in the homosexual community who could be correctly defined as "heterosexual" by the definition of the former man?

I guess it is too late to isolate HIV infected people even though it is clear that some infected people don't mind giving the virus to others. To the best of the government's ability, these barebacking parties should be policed and outlawed.

British people have a long and (ig)noble tradition of anti-intellectualism. It is an insult to call a British person "clever". If you asked the average French person to name five important French intellectuals, they probably could, (Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Barthes, Sokal, the abovementioned Baudrillard e.t.c.). Ask a British person to name five important British intellectuals and they probably couldn't. (I'm British, by the way, and British intellectuals don't spring to mind nearly as readily as the French ones do.) The Home Secretary recently suggested compulsory English lessons for immigrants. Some of the immigrants pointed out that they were already more literate and well-read in English than the natives were. This feature of British life used to give my teachers apoplectic fits. No one is more popular in the pub than the one who can pun like they do in The Sun. (Check out the awesome alliteration, scansion and rhyming scheme in that last line.)However, I think it is often mere self-effacement. British people are smart enough to know their place in the food chain (formerly known as the Great Chain of Being), they know that people who fancy themselves as leaders will lie to them and go their own way and no amount of broadsheet reading is going to change that. So you might as well keep yourself entertained and be a hit with the guys in the pub because you can name all the characters in Eastenders and discuss authoritatively Premiership football.

In Rene Girard's analysis of why scapegoats are chosen, it is often the most indifferent who are chosen. Scapegoats are used because society is a structure of desire, specifically mimetic desire. We want things because we see that others want them. Under those circumstances, we are all competing for an economy of love objects, e.g. oil to light our homes. There are winners and losers and when somebody loses the structure of desire breaks down and violence is precipitated which falls on the head of certain apparently arbitrarily chosen scapegoats. Importantly, it is often those who are not obviously participating in the competition that are chosen.

Christianity and Islam are considered Jewish heresies (by historian Paul Johnson, for example) but one wonders why non-Jews would want a shot of whatever the Jews are on. For Johnson, the point was that the Jews did not say they had a god, they said they had the God, and in particular they were His chosen people. Cases have been made in the past that Hitler's detestation of the Jews was basically infantile jealously--a Gentile on the outside looking in at the Jews enjoying their cosy, special relationship with the Father. He killed six million Jews in an attempt to deny that, and indeed the fact of Auschwitz impacts the faith of many Jews. What has not been addressed until now is the reason for the racial separation of the Jews--namely, one inherits the status of Jew from one's mother. So the notion (meme?) that some people have a special relationship with the one and only God is perpetuated down the maternal line and the child does not have an option about his or her religious status. The Muslims also do not have a choice about their religion because although they are not technically born Muslims, once they are Muslims, they can be executed for apostasy. Now if it is the case that freedom to choose is our greatest joy, then we have a situation where millions of human beings cannot choose their religious conduct, they cannot choose how they would like to worship God. And I suggest that the denial of that freedom drives some people to become suicidal. There will not be peace in the Middle East until these issues are addressed. From a memetic point of view, you have an irresistable force meeting an immovable object. But were these memes invented to protect the privileges of a few? The caliphs? The priests? I think they were.